Sectarianism is an orphan of history.This paper was originally presented to the Davis Seminar at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, in November 1998. I am grateful to the participants in the seminar as well as my colleagues at Rice University, whose criticisms helped make this essay more coherent. That, at least, seems to be the consensus of the scholarship on Middle Eastern religious violence. Unlike recent studies of communalism in India and Spain,For the case of India, see Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For Spain, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). which have explored the cultural and discursive aspects of sectarian violence, analyses of Middle Eastern religious mobilizations have long been, and remain, preoccupied with the alleged failure of the Middle East to modernize—with its failure, in other words, to replicate a secular Western path of development.